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Practically human: Can smart machines do your job?

This combination of Associated Press file photos shows, left, an information technology room in 2001, in Hurst, Texas, and right, a SAP server room in 2012, in Walldorf, Germany. SAP allows companies to use cloud computing to track sales and inventory without needing to hire IT employees. (AP Photo)

This combination of Associated Press file photos shows a worker, left, assembling a motor in a Mercedes Benz factory in 2008 in Berlin, and a robot, right, painting a brake drum at Webb Wheel Products, in 2013, in Cullman, Ala.. Thanks to robots, Webb Wheel hasn't added a factory worker in over three years, though it's making 300,000 more drums annually, a 25 percent increase. (AP Photo)

This combination of Associated Press file photos shows, left, mail carrier Mike Gillis delivering mail in 2011, in Montpelier, Vt., and right, Microsoft Outlook being demonstrated on a desktop computer in 2013, in New York. The number of "mail carriers" in the U.S. fell 10 percent from 358,000 to 321,000 in ten years through 2010. (AP Photo)

This is the second in a three-part series on the loss of middle-class jobs in the wake of the Great Recession, and the role of technology.

WASHINGTON — Art Liscano knows he’s an endangered species in the job market: He’s a meter reader in Fresno, Calif. For 26 years, he’s driven from house to house, checking how much electricity Pacific Gas & Electric customers have used.

But PG&E doesn’t need many people like Liscano making rounds anymore. Every day, the utility replaces 1,200 old-fashioned meters with digital versions that can collect information without human help, generate more accurate power bills, even send an alert if the power goes out.

“I can see why technology is taking over,” says Liscano, 66, who earns $67,000 a year. “We can see the writing on the wall.” His department employed 50 full-time meter readers just six years ago. Now, it has six.

From giant corporations to university libraries to startup businesses, employers are using rapidly improving technology to do tasks that humans used to do. That means millions of workers are caught in a competition they can’t win against machines that keep getting more powerful, cheaper and easier to use.

To better understand the impact of technology on jobs, The Associated Press analyzed employment data from 20 countries; and interviewed economists, technology experts, robot manufacturers, software developers, CEOs, and workers who are competing with smarter machines.

The AP found that almost all the jobs disappearing are the midskill, midpay jobs — jobs with salaries ranging from $38,000 to $68,000 in the U.S. — that form the backbone of the middle class in developed countries in Europe, North America and Asia.

In the United States, half of the 7.5 million jobs lost during the Great Recession paid middle-class wages, and the numbers are even more grim in the 17 European countries that use the euro as their currency. A total of 7.6 million midpay jobs disappeared in those countries from January 2008 through last June.

Those jobs are being replaced in many cases by machines and software that can do the same work better and cheaper.

“Everything that humans can do a machine can do,” says Moshe Vardi, a computer scientist at Rice University in Houston. “Things are happening that look like science fiction.”

Does technology also create jobs? Of course. But at nowhere near the rate that it’s killing them off — at least for the foreseeable future. Here’s a look at three technological factors reshaping the economies and job markets in developed countries:

BIG DATA

At the heart of the biggest technological changes today is what computer scientists call “Big Data.” Computers thrive on information, and they’re feasting on an unprecedented amount of it — from the Internet, from Twitter messages and other social media sources, from the barcodes and sensors being slapped on everything from boxes of Huggies diapers to stamping machines in car plants.

According to a Harvard Business Review article by Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, more information now crosses the Internet every second than the entire Internet stored 20 years ago. No human could make sense of so much data. But computers can.

Software entrepreneur Martin Ford says “organizations are collecting huge amounts of data about their internal operations and about what their employees are doing.” The computers can use that information to “figure out how to do a great many jobs” that humans do now.

THE CLOUD

In the old days — say, five years ago — businesses that had to track lots of information needed to install servers in their offices and hire technical staff to run them. “Cloud computing” has changed everything.

Now, companies can store information on the Internet — perhaps through Amazon Web Services or Google App Engine — and grab it when they need it. And they don’t need to hire experts to do it.

Cloud computing “is a catch-all term for the ability to rent as much computer power as you need without having to buy it, without having to know a lot about it,” McAfee says. “It really has opened up very high-powered computing to the masses.”

SMARTER MACHINES

Though many are still working out the kinks, software is making machines and devices smarter every year. They can learn your habits, recognize your voice, do the things that travel agents, secretaries and interpreters have traditionally done.

Microsoft has unveiled a system that can translate what you say into Mandarin and play it back — in your voice. The Google Now personal assistant can tell you if there’s a traffic jam on your regular route home and suggest an alternative. Talk to Apple’s Siri and she can reschedule an appointment.

Besides becoming more powerful and creative, machines and their software are becoming easier to use. That has made consumers increasingly comfortable relying on them to transact business. As well as eliminated jobs of bank tellers, ticket agents and checkout cashiers.

People who used to say “Let me talk to a person. I don’t want to deal with this machine” are now using check-in kiosks at airports and self-checkout lanes at supermarkets and drugstores, says Jeff Connally, CEO of CMIT Solutions, a technology consultancy. The most important change in technology, he says, is “the profound simplification of the user interface.”

So machines are getting smarter and people are more comfortable using them. Those factors, combined with the financial pressures of the Great Recession, have led companies and government agencies to cut jobs the past five years, yet continue to operate just as well.

And then there are the meter readers like PG&E’s Liscano. Their future looks grim.

Southern California Edison finished its digital meter installation program late last year. All but 20,000 of its 5.3 million customers have their power usage beamed directly to the utility. Nearly all of the 972 meter readers in Southern California Edison’s territory accepted retirement packages or were transferred within the company, says Pat Lavin of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. But 92 workers are being laid off this month.

“Trying to keep it from happening would have been like the Teamsters in the early 1900s trying to stop the combustion engine,” Lavin says. “You can’t stand in the way of technology.”